Under the Hood of .NET Memory Management - Simple Talk

Chapter 2: The Simple Heap Model
Periodically, the finalization thread will run, and it will iterate through all objects pointed
to by references in the fReachable queue, calling the Finalize method or destructor
on each one and removing its reference from fReachable. Only then will the finalizable
object be rootless and available for collection.
In the earlier example, Object Z made it to Gen 2, where it could potentially have
remained for a while. What we don't know is whether Object Z was actually needed for all
that time, or whether its finalization was just poorly implemented.
This doesn't mean that finalizers are bad; in fact, they are absolutely essential. But you
do need to write your finalization mechanism in the right way, which is what comes next.
Improving finalization efficiency
A simple pattern you can follow to avoid the finalization problem, is by implementing the
IDisposable interface on your class and applying the following Dispose pattern:
public void Dispose()
{
Cleanup(true);
GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
}
private void Cleanup(bool disposing)
{
if (!disposing)
{
// Thread-specific code goes here
}
// Resource Cleanup goes here
}
public void Finalize()
{
Cleanup(false);
Listing 2.4: Improving finalization efficiency using Dispose.
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